Directly linked to the origin of life, glycolaldehyde is an advantageous find for researchers seeking out habitable planets.

A team of international researchers used the powerful IRAM radio telescope in France to observe G31.41+0.31 with high angular resolution and at different wavelengths. This allowed the researchers to view astronomical objects with extreme sharpness and fine detail. Several observations confirmed the presence of glycolaldehyde at the core of the region.

The simplest of monosaccharide sugars, glycolaldehyde (the prefix "glyco" indicates the presence of a sugar on a non-carbohydrate substance) can react with the substance propenal to form ribose, the backbone of ribonucleic acid (RNA). Although deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is more of a celebrity these days in our gene-obsessed culture, most scientists believe that RNA molecules were central components of the earliest cells.

Monday, November 24, 2008

Remember Gray's paradox? In 1936 the eponymous British zoologist James Gray couldn't reconcile his observations of dolphins swimming at speeds of over 20 miles per hour with his calculations, which demonstrated that dolphin muscles simply weren't built to produce enough acceleration to overcome drag. He ended up blaming this drag violation on dolphin's skin, postulating that it must have drag-reducing properties.

Fast forward decades later to this year's Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) Division of Fluid Dynamics in San Antonio, Texas, where professor Timothy Wei of Rensselaer School of Engineering announced that he and a team of researchers had solved Gray's paradox- and no, skin has nothing to do with the speediness of these adorable sea mammals.

Wei and his team are the first to provide solid evidence illustrating that dolphins actually do produce enough force to overcome drag. "The scientific community has known this for a while, but this is the first time anyone has been able to actually quantitatively measure the force and say, for certain, the paradox is solved, said Wei in a Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute press release.

Using combined force measurement tools developed for aerospace research with Digital Particle Image Velocimetry (a video-based measurement technique that captures 1,000 video frames per second), Wei tracked two bottlenose dolphins, Primo and Pula, as they swam through water heavily populated with tiny air bubbles.

The color-coded results showed the speed and direction of water flow around and behind the each dolphin, enabling the researchers o calculate precisely how much force was produced.

Turns out they produce way more force that Gray ever imagined- approximately 200 pounds of force is created by tail flapping ( in contrast, Olympic swimmers only generate 60-70 pounds of force at top speed). Good thing dolphins are considered harmless!
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Producer John Adam's Doctor Atomic is a two-act opera about the making of the Atom Bomb, the nuclear weapon that was eventually dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki near the end of World War II.

The setting is the summer of 1945, in the desert of Los Alamos, New Mexico, where J. Robert Oppenheimer and a team of scientists gathered to build and test the bomb for the first time.

The opera focuses on renowned physicist Robert Oppenheimer and his scientific and moral dilemma surrounding the Los Alamos project-with lots of science thrown in. Created from various sources ( including declassified government documents), the text or libretto of the opera is littered with discussions on uranium and plutonium, the TNT equivalency of the bomb, and whether or not a test explosion might set the atmosphere on fire-an indisputably bad scenario.

Atomic energy is created by the splitting (fission) or joining (fusion) of atoms- but only by using specific isotopes of uranium or plutonium can a massively destructive explosion be reached. The two atomic bombs detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki relied on fission.

Elements undergoing fission ( for example uranium) release neutrons. Some neutrons are scooped up by other uranium nuclei leading to more fission, while others escape the process altogether. If the expected number of neutrons which trigger new fissions is less than 1, a nuclear chain reaction may occur but the size will decrease exponentially.If the expected number of neutrons is greater than 1, the chain reaction will increase exponentially. The term 'critical mass' describes the point at which the expected number of neutrons causing fission is 1 or more, thus becoming a self-sustaining chain reaction.

The bomb released over Hiroshima used TNT to blow subcritical masses of uranium 235 together, resulting in a 10 kiloton explosion. "Fat man", the bomb used against Nagasaki was a subcritical mass of plutonium 239 squeezed to bit by TNT and causing a 20 kiloton explosion.

If you find yourself in the mood for an operatic pondering of nuclear fusion and fission, Dr. Atomic will finish a run at the Metropolitan Opera in New York Thursday November 12, ad then travel to London at the English National Opera.

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Take a look at the painting on your left. "The artist climbed 23,000 feet in a specially modified plane to work on the piece while weightless," this article purports.

Pause. Now wait a minute. Now cringe.

The terms "weightlessness" and "zero gravity" are constantly thrown around haphazardly, in part because there is a vague misconception surrounding what it means to be "weightless".

The notion that one can experience weightlessness by being high enough above the earth's surface is disingenuous. Weightlessness is not caused by distance from the Earth but by being in orbit!

The International Space Station is 250 miles above the Earth, where gravitational attraction is just 10% less than on the Earth's surface- so how could one experience zero gravity at a mere 23,000 feet (around 4.5 miles) ?

Astronauts at the International Space Station experience weightlessness because they are orbiting the planet, not because they are above it. It is being in orbit that causes you to feel weightless, or gives the impression of floating, when in fact you are continuously falling around the earth.

Notwithstanding, the painting recently sold for $ 75,000. I'm sensing a future barrage of artwork that claims to be made while "in weightlessness..."
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The researchers struck gold; literally. By shooting a laser through a gold sample the size of the head of a push pin, approximately 100 billion positron particles were generated, shooting out of the sample in a cone-shaped plasma "jet".

Accelerated and ionized or charged by the laser, electrons plough through the gold sample, hitting gold nuclei along the way. The electron-gold nuclei interactions serve as a catalyst to create positrons, kind of like how fertilizer assists in the growth of plants. The laser is able to produce large quantities of positrons by concentrating the energy given off by electrons in space and time.

This new ability to create enormous amounts of positrons in the lab is significant-it could one day lead to discoveries explaining why more matter than anti-matter survived the Big Bang at the nascent of the universe. That is, answer the question of why we are made of matter and not anti-matter!
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A group of researchers produced novel pictures of a small solar system comprising three planets (two of which are shown in the image above) orbiting a star called HR 899, about 130 light years away from Earth. The pictures are extraordinary because until now, distant planets orbiting stars had never been directly and visually observed. Most other star orbiting planets have only been observed indirectly, when their path of orbit lay between Earth and their host star, or through gravitational effects.

According to calculations done by the researchers, all of the planets weigh roughly 7-10 times more than Jupiter. They orbit a ginormous star too, about 1.5 times heavier and 5 times brighter than our sun. Despite the differences, this fledging solar system is similar to our own, orbiting much like our own remote planets do.

The planetary triad was easier than usual to spot, partly because all three planets had the bright glow of an approximately 60 million year-old youth. Still reeling from their gravitational collapse, the planets continue to glow brightly. Consequently, they generated enough heat to be seen in the infrared spectrum. The researchers were then able to photograph the planets in infrared light using a technique called adaptive optics.

Adaptive optics works by correcting the distortion or twisting and bending that light undergoes as it enters Earth's atmosphere. Over the years, steady improvement in this technique has allowed ground telescopes to snap photos of far-off bodies with as much acuity and colorful intensity as those from the Hubble.

With further probing and increasingly sophisticated technology, astronomers may eventually find the equivalent of cosmic gold: a planet-like earth orbiting a sun-like star. Who knows, they may even find human-like life too.
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Friday, November 14, 2008

Ironically, the Fermi Problem Task Force was unable to post a Fermi problem last week because we traveled to Fermi Lab for the 2008 Congress of the Society of Physics Students. I highly recommend a visit and tour of Fermi Lab if you are ever near Chicago. However, with further ado, allow me to present this week's Fermi Problem:

I was riding my bike to the Physics Central headquarters yesterday morning while it was raining. By the time I arrived, I was wearing more water than clothes. During this wet cycling endeavor, there were two thoughts bouncing around in my head:

1. I realized that I was very thirsty.2. I also wondered (this is the Fermi problem) how many rain drops could I catch in my mouth throughout my 15 min ride?

Eleven years ago, they founded the SESAME ( Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East) in Amman, Jordan with the goal of bringing together scientists from across the Middle East to a single facility.

Their vision of Palestinians and Israelis, Turks and Cypriots, Iranian and Egyptians collaborating on experiments has almost come to fruition, were it not for a pesky particle accelerator. The 124m in circumference accelerator is the last component, the key in the door, the final piece of the puzzle to get SESAME up and running. The only setback? A funding shortfall of 15 million euros.

In a quote from the BBC article, technical director Dr. Amor Nadji said, " We are scientists; I am a scientist, you are a scientist, and we can talk together even though we are different. And, for sure, if you are a Palestinian you can be close to an Israeli, and you can talk together, you can work together. And maybe this can help."

A synchrotron is a particle accelerator designed to produce intense beams ofx-ray and ultraviolet (UV) light. Synchrotron light allows scientists to probe further into the composition of matter and are especially useful in chemical, geological and semiconductor material analysis. To date, the largest synchrotron in the world is the Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP) at CERN in Switzerland.

Going back to an earlier theme, SESAME is a paradigm of scientific citizenship. Just goes to show that civic science doesn't always involve politics- sometimes bypassing formalities altogether can produce results.Read the rest of the post . . .

Thursday, November 13, 2008

With all of our brain power working on grand experiments like the LHC and pondering big questions about black holes, we occasionally run into some seemingly simple mysteries. For instance, how does a dipping bird work? Or will a slinky perpetually slink down an ascending escalator?

Please send us explanations and videos of you tackling these elusive mysteries. Who knows, we may post it up on the Physics Buzz Blog.
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Shock waves, the explosive booms associated with jets that send us quailing with our hands clamped over our ears, may be a key ingredient in the formation of new planets.

Just because aircraft can move faster than the speed of sound, doesn't mean sound waves can. Since the aircraft can't just toss aside fettered sound waves, they end up "piling up" against each other as the aircraft plows through the air. The result is an immense wave pressure or shock wave.

Some scientists theorize that shock waves emerge when high-speed swirling disks of gas collide into each other, and eventually lump together during the first few million year's of a planet's formation.

Surprising evidence for the theory has recently surfaced in tiny quartz-like crystals called cristobalite and tridymite found near five baby stars just beginning to form planets, and detected by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Known to reside in meteorites and comets that land on Earth (and even in volcanic lava), these two types of silica crystals can only form after violent, intense bursts of energy like shock waves.

Authors of the study say that the discovery has given scientists a better cookbook containing the raw ingredients needed not only to create other star systems at the earliest stages of inception, but maybe even our own planets.
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Tuesday, November 11, 2008

The blog has awoken from a light slumber (any soporific virtues science may have certainly doesn't stem from this exciting, hip outlet). Anyway, these past few days I was at Fermilab in Batavia IL for the 2008 Sigma Pi Sigma Quadrennial Congress, along with 550 other attendees.

This year's theme was "scientific citizenship". Civic scientists aren't holed up in isolation in their labs performing calculations and experiments and ignoring the rest of the world. They are actively supporting both scientific and non scientific causes and involved in local and maybe even national politics. Most importantly, they are visible in and accessible to their local communities.

Turns out Einstein was a renegade civic scientist when it came to race, as I discovered in a lecture by Fred Jerome and Rodger Taylor, co authors of the book Einstein on Race and Racism.

History has largely concealed Einstein's anti-racism activist persona, but these two authors dusted off hundreds of old documents and dug the facts out of decades of rubble.

For example, Einstein was co-chairman of the New American Crusade against Lynching at a time when institutionalized segregation was the norm in his own town of Princeton, New Jersey, and his place of employment (Princeton University) did not accept black students, or women.

Einstein would walk the streets of Princeton's black community in solidarity, mingling and talking with its denizens. According to Jerome and Taylor, some of the older community members actually knew Einstein and remembered him fondly.

He even spoke at Lincoln University, an all-black college in Pennsylvania in May of 1946. While the written speech vanished, photos taken by a few African American journalists confirm the event.

Fighting injustice is not an act most people associate with scientists. But oh how it should be, seeing as the world's greatest scientist was a compassionate and dedicated social activist.

Einstein once remarked, " The more I feel an American, the more this situation plains me. I can escape the feeling of complicity in it only by speaking out". After the lecture, Sigma Pi Sigma members signed a letter upholding Einstein's pledge to to speak out against racism.
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